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Apple does what a certain Matthew calls the great GPL purge. Apple has been including open source software with OSX for a long time. The problem there is that version three of the GNU Public License adds some restrictions that Apple cannot live with. One such restriction is that the end user needs to be allows to modify the software as they like. The term for this is:

Tivoization (pronounced “Teevo-ization”) is a term coined to describe the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license (like the GPL), but uses hardware restrictions to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware.

Apple is trying to do something similar with Lion as they are on iOS when battling jail breaking. They want to control the hardware and what runs on it totally themselves. So they are silently opposing open software that restricts their restricting. One of the effects is that last year Apple removed Samba from OS X. Replacing GCC with LLVM is another such move. And then there are several items shipping with Lion which are hopelessly outdated, like the shell. There are guides on the internet how to install a newer version, on is the homebrew project.

10.7.3 breaks app submission, Verify complains about 0x0 size Icon.

As jfosback from Apple said, (thanks for the quick solution, would have been stuck there with an unhappy client…)

The argument that Apple is trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X because of some evil conspiracy seems kind of silly to me.

Lots of companies are abandoning GPLv3-licensed software.

A big part of this is the patent provisions. No company is going to sue their own users for “actually using the GPL-licensed software” they ship. It’s more likely that Apple’s lawyers are prohibiting the inclusion of GPLv3-licensed software out of fear that it would invalidate Apple’s entire patent portfolio, by rendering them unable to sue competitors who’ve violated Apple’s patents merely because the competitor has a few Macs with Apple-shipped GPLv3 software on them.

As to the anti-Tivoization bits of GPLv3, *of course* Apple isn’t going to want to have to open up iOS, but I doubt they’re trying to lock down OS X (at least, not to the same degree).

And lastly, when it comes to GCC vs LLVM, there are lots of reasons to not want to muck around with the GCC project that have nothing to do with GCC’s license. LLVM is a perfectly good compiler, and *also* open source. Given the headaches of maintaining their own fork of GCC (which they were doing long before they switched to LLVM), they probably still would’ve ditched GCC even if GCC hadn’t been relicensed under the GPLv3.

In summary, it seems to me that Apple isn’t so much anti-open-source as they are just anti-GPLv3.